Earlier this month, the North Atlantic experienced a rare January hurricane, named Hurricane Alex. While Alex’s northward track kept it in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, it’s arrival in the waters south of Greenland coincided with a sudden outflowing of meltwater through a bay in the Western Greenland, indicating that the warm winds that accompanied Alex had triggered a melting event.
read more
As Greenland’s glaciers melt, gigantic chunks of ice are breaking off. They are so large that they are causing powerful earthquakes as they tumble into the ocean.
A team of researchers from Swansea University in the UK, the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, and a number of other institutions, studied GPS data from Greenland’s fast-moving Helheim Glacier, and the glacier’s calving front, where icebergs break off into the ocean, and correlated this with seismic data for earthquake timings. They found that large earthquakes, in the 4.6 to 5.2 range, are generated when billion-ton ice sheets break off from the glacier’s forward face.
read more
An international team of scientists has discovered that the last remaining stable portion of the Greenland ice sheet is stable no more.
The finding, which will likely boost estimates of expected global sea level rise in the future, appears in the March 16 issue of the journal Nature Climate
read more
A recent study has indicated that the Jakobshavn Glacier in Greenland is experiencing a rapid melt that threatens to raise sea levels by up to one centimeter.
The glacier, which is thought to have yielded the iceberg that ended the Titanic’s fated voyage, has begun to melt at an alarming rate, about four times faster than it was reducing in the 1990s. This puts it at the top of the glacier-melting charts, making it the fastest flowing river of ice in the world.
The recent research project, published in the Cryosphere journal, examined images from the German TerraSAR-X satellites to monitor the speed of the glacier.
read more